SAN FRANCISCO—At the Game Developers Conference, Google announced its biggest play yet in the gaming space: a streaming game service named Google Stadia, designed to run on everything from PCs and Android phones to Google's own Chromecast devices.

Google Stadia will run a selection of existing PC games on Google's centralized servers, taking in controller inputs and sending back video and audio using Google's network of low-latency data centers. The company revealed a new Google-produced controller, along with a game-streaming interface that revolves around a "play now" button. Press this on any Web browser and gameplay will begin "in as quick as five seconds... with no download, no patch, no update, and no install."

"With Stadia, this waiting game will be a thing of the past," Google's Phil Harrison said. He then demonstrated Stadia gameplay on a Pixel 3 XL, followed by "the least-powerful PC we could find." The following gameplay was advertised as "1080p, 60 frames per second." Harrison confirmed that existing "USB controllers and mouse-and-keyboard" will function with Stadia games as well.

Back of the controller.

Harrison holds Stadia's controller.

A few color options.

The controller connects wirelessly, as the icon there clearly indicates.

Google Assistant button.

Some interesting logos back there.

But you'll want that Stadia controller if you'd like to access both a "capture" button, for immediate capture to YouTube (to either livestream or save for later sharing), and a Google Assistant button, which lets Stadia players access the controller's built-in microphone. Google didn't confirm whether existing controllers' "share" buttons will work with any of the Stadia platform's custom button functions.

Harrison confirmed one interesting Google-tinged combination of the Google Assistant and a live-streaming service: tap the button if you're stuck mid-game and ask out loud for help. But we'll simply have to take Harrison's word for it, in terms of how that actually plays out and how intelligently Google Assistant will translate users' mid-game requests.

stats

After the event, Google provided a fact sheet to Ars Technica confirming more stats about the hardware included in the Google Stadia stacks. These include custom-built AMD GPUS with 56 compute units and integrated HBM2 memory; "custom, hyperthreaded x86" CPUs (no manufacturer listed) that run at 2.7GHz "with AVX2 SIMD"; and "a total of 16GB combined VRAM and system RAM clocked at "up to 484 GB/s."

The keynote included Google's pledge that its network infrastructure includes "7,500 edge nodes closer to players to provide better performance." Stadia's stacks at Google's data centers are powered by AMD hardware, the company said, with "10.7 teraflops of power in each instance."

A Google engineer insisted that "at launch," Stadia will support "4K, 60 frames-per-second performance." If you don't have a 4K set to enjoy that gameplay with, Google says its capture button will save and stream your gameplay content at that resolution, should the game in question support it.

Unreal and Unity were announced as supporters of the Stadia platform. Vulkan is joining the party, too, as confirmed by id Software. The game developer said that it needed "a few weeks" to port its current, unfinished code for the game Doom Eternal to Stadia's platform, and it confirmed that the upcoming game will work on Stadia at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. (GDC attendees will get to see the game in action on the show floor later today.) id did not confirm whether the game will appear on Stadia day-and-date with existing consoles and PCs.

Promises of crazy-high performance for the upcoming Doom Eternal on Google Stadia.

A hint at how "multi-GPU" options will boost performance and graphical options.

Big promise there, Google.

Great news.

In one curious moment, Harrison told viewers that Stadia games' effects and features could vary, should a game be rendered on multiple GPUs within Google's cloud system. This seems to imply that there will be an option to request more or less infrastructure dedicated to a single streamed game, but it's currently unclear whether that will cost developers or players more money to access those.

Google has expressed interest in and support for cross-platform play, and the company insisted that its cloud-based platform will not be vulnerable to cheating or hacking due to multiplayer instances that aren't exposed to "the public Internet." We'll have to wait to see how big console and PC platforms react to Google's call for cross-platform support, however, especially if Stadia games revolve around their own walled multiplayer-server gardens.

As part of the Game Developers Conference, the event made sure to emphasize trippy features that game makers might access through Google's cloud infrastructure. These included the ability to access intense physics systems, place thousands of cameras in various places in a game's world, and re-skin games with a huge variety of machine-generated images. One example included a modern, 3D Tequila Works (makers of RiME) video game smothered in a seemingly endless swirl of Pac-Man images.

Stadia players, meanwhile, will be able to access a new twist in gameplay: "state share." As introduced by legendary game developer Dylan Cuthbert, this feature will "let a player instantly share a playable moment from a game." Think of a "save state" within a classic emulator, which starts a player at a certain point in a quest with certain equipped items and progress; then imagine a modern game maker letting players click a URL (or share it on social media) and try those things out for its titles. (Nintendo has toyed with something similar in the NES classic library on Nintendo Switch Online.)

Game developer Jade Raymond confirms her new gig for Google Stadia's "first-party" development studio.

So many logos and services.

Notice an utter lack of pricing info? We did, too.

Near the end of the presentation, longtime video game designer Jade Raymond finally had her new job at Google confirmed: head of Stadia Games and Entertainment. This followed Harrison's confirmation that Google Stadia will get "exclusive" games from this first-party game studio. "Our team will also be working with external developers to make all of the bleeding edge Google technology you've seen here today available to partner studios big and small," Raymond said. This statement leaves open to interpretation whether this will lead to third-party exclusives for Stadia.

The only "official" site for Google Stadia as of press time is tucked into the Google Store. Missing from that site is a loud confirmation of exactly which game publishers are lined up to launch games on Stadia, beyond what the event showed of Assassin's Creed Odyssey gameplay, a Doom Eternal logo, and a trio of game developers' assurances that they're interested.

Ars Technica will go hands-on with whatever Google has on the GDC show floor following the event.

Google's announcement follows weeks of teases and hints of a major announcement centered on some sort of streaming gaming solution. It also follows the public beta test of Google's Project Stream, which let players try Assassin's Creed Odyssey in a browser window. Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned that this test hinted to "the worst-kept secret in the industry" and reached "19 regions, 58 zones, and 200 countries."

"Think about the way the Web works," Pichai told the GDC crowd. "You can easily share a link and it works seamlessly. We want games to feel that way, too. Instantly enjoyable with access for everyone."

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

320 Reader Comments

That powerful backend is going to have to be updated constantly if they ever expect to deliver 4k:60fps. Its hard enough to do locally and the WINE overhead is certainly not free.

First of all, they don't need to aim at 4K / 60 fps for all cases. That's insane over the network and in general case. More likely resolution will be lower. Secondly, Wine can handle it fine given enough processing power which Google have, especially when games are using Vulkan on Windows like new Doom does. Translation overhead is a lot smaller in such cases.

If they figure out some way to provide this while charging $10 or less a month, and build up a substantial library of games - this could be the Netflix of Gaming that people have been positing as inevitable for years.

A substantial library of games is going to be problematic, because they went with their custom platform, as in games will have to be specifically ported to this. It's Steam Machines Google Cloud Edition.

Almost nobody ports games using Wine (I won't say nobody because I'm pretty sure a few Linux game releases actually literally have been the Windows version packaged with Wine). Wine isn't for porting - it is for end users to run existing software in Linux. These aren't the same thing. And Stadia isn't a Linux PC in the cloud from the user's standpoint - Google isn't interested in users running existing PC games in the cloud.

What "almost nobody does" is irrelevant. Google are making something new and can propose such option in the short term, especially when it is a lot cheaper than a proper native port.

Valve did just that with Proton (Wine's variant), providing a lot of games for Linux out of the box successfully. So you can't even claim almost nobody does it anymore.

Of course Google should pitch native releases to developers, but as solution for those who can't afford them or want to release already now - Wine is perfect.

Steam is a platform for releasing PC games. So using Proton to bring more PC games to another PC OS is pretty on brand. Stadia isn't about PC games.

And Proton isn't porting that is enabling Steam users to download Windows games for an approved list of titles proven to work on Proton.

On the one hand, I basically read the entire article as "It works! We caught up to the 5 other people doing this. Also here's a Nintendo-style gimmick that will be forgotten a month into release." On the other, I will admit I personally have spent several months researching and compiling information into my own video summarizing various streaming services. But that said, doing that video allowed me to move beyond the agonizingly focused question of "Can it work?" to "What is the use case" and "How will this be monetized". From skimming the article, I didn't see that answered anywhere.

I also see no value in a cloud streaming service that doesn't come anchored with the possibility to install locally. Google's experiments in particular are so transient that this system could be shuttered by the end of 2020. NO ONE I know is going to spend more than $20 on a game if that's its potential fate. ($1 books and apps on Amazon? Maybe. But not $60 video games.) So even though I like the idea of cloud gaming, companies like Microsoft, EA, NVidia, and Sony are FAR better positioned to offer something like this - they already have the whole "download local copy and play offline" system down pat as an alternative option / insurance policy.

This is going to come down to pricing and content, as long as the service works as advertised. It sounds like it could be expensive to maintain the infrastructure since they're targeting high end gaming.

They're also going to face some serious competition from Microsoft, especially if the entire Xbox library is available on xCloud at launch. Google will have to convince developers to port their games to Stadia while Microsoft has the advantage of Xbox games just working without any code changes. Not to mention Xbox and PC game development coming closer together.

Some people might not like the idea of game streaming, I'm not entirely convinced myself, but I do welcome the competition in the gaming space.

Steam is a platform for releasing PC games. So using Proton to bring more PC games to another PC OS is pretty on brand. Stadia isn't about PC games.

And Proton isn't porting that is enabling Steam users to download Windows games for an approved list of titles proven to work on Proton.

Stadia could perfectly leverage all the same PC games, as long as they are runnable on Linux either natively or through Wine. I see no reason why it couldn't.

I.e. some PC developer that has a Windows only game can in theory release it on Stadia through Wine. What exactly should prevent that

Sure they could. But I think they'd have pitched it that way to developers at the Game Developers Conference. They didn't they pitched a unique platform built on Linux. Most games are using middleware of some type so native porting is way easier than I think you think it is.

And my guess is nothing is preventing a game developer from leveraging Wine on this platform themselves. But that is a really poor way to 'port' a game.

This is going to come down to pricing and content, as long as the service works as advertised. It sounds like it could be expensive to maintain the infrastructure since they're targeting high end gaming.

They're also going to face some serious competition from Microsoft, especially if the entire Xbox library is available on xCloud at launch. Google will have to convince developers to port their games to Stadia while Microsoft has the advantage of Xbox games just working without any code changes. Not to mention Xbox and PC game development coming closer together.

Some people might not like the idea of game streaming, I'm not entirely convinced myself, but I do welcome the competition in the gaming space.

It's not competition when there are zero Stadia subscriptions sold. I'm not going to hold my breath in 2020 waiting on the Google earnings report to tell us how many Stadia subs they have going.

BTW, just having a sort-of developer story isn't good enough. Ask Microsoft how UWP has gone.

Sure they could. But I think they'd have pitched it that way to developers at the Game Developers Conference. They didn't they pitched a unique platform built on Linux. Most games are using middleware of some type so native porting is way easier than I think you think it is.

I.e. as long as Google are not against using Wine, I don't see anyone preventing developers from doing it.

If native porting was a lot easier than using Wine, we would have seen tons of native Linux ports everywhere. Yet, that didn't happen while a lot and a lot of games are playable through Wine on Linux today.

I like the look of the controller. I want to hold it and see how it feels

If the Chromecast we bought in December is compatible, that means all I need is a subscription to the service. Yay me!?

PlayStation Now has a slight head start. But Google really reaches far for platform agnosticism. Stadia seems likely to be available to more people.

COSTIt all comes down to cost. Nobody wants to pay $40-60 for access to a single game on a streaming service. They’ll pay $10-20 per month for access to a library, but not for one specific game. This was a huge flaw of OnLive on top of the insufficient streaming technology at the time.

Most gamers prefer locally downloaded games on capable hardware. What’s nice is that services like this compliment those ideal situations and offer better games to a wider audience who might not otherwise spend time or money on these games.

Sure they could. But I think they'd have pitched it that way to developers at the Game Developers Conference. They didn't they pitched a unique platform built on Linux. Most games are using middleware of some type so native porting is way easier than I think you think it is.

They explicitly mentioned Linux and Vulkan...

If native porting was a lot easier than using Wine, we would have seen tons of native Linux ports everywhere

Yes because the platform is built on it. But not because this is an Ubuntu instance in the cloud to just run whatever on.

But you're right there's probably nothing stopping developers from using Wine unless the license forbids it.

And the reason games aren't on Linux isn't because it is hard to port natively. It is about the lack of an audience.

And the reason games aren't on Linux isn't because it is hard to port natively. It is about the lack of an audience.

Which is exactly why this kind of service can provide an incentive for developers to make more Linux games, which will indirectly benefit Linux gaming on the desktop as well, i.e. not streaming but regular PC gaming use case on Linux.

I was on the AC Odyssey beta of this and it ran pretty good. The graphics were good, though at times you could tell it was being compressed, and it would have been nice to pick a different resolution (it streams at 1080 but my monitor is 1440). Wasn't really any input lag that I could tell.

And the reason games aren't on Linux isn't because it is hard to port natively. It is about the lack of an audience.

Which is exactly why this kind of service can provide an incentive for developers to make more Linux games, which will indirectly benefit Linux gaming on the desktop as well, i.e. not streaming but regular PC gaming use case on Linux.

One thing that I've been thinking about for these types of services is they run best on long tail 'engagement' games.

And they probably will not work best with competitive multiplayer games as currently envisioned because latency.

So they will work best with slower games, and the games that dominate the hours charts for users, from what I remember looking at that data tended to be games with mods..... which almost certainly won't work with this, so.... yeah. (I'm excluding F2P or mobile gaming because the audience behavior functionally distinct from PC/Console gaming)

I've experimented with live streaming with GeForce Now and had no issues with latency. This is probably due to my game choices and the fact that my reaction time is usually the weak point in any lag situation.

The big problem for me was data caps. Playing a couple hours a night I blew past my 1TB data cap in half a month. I think for most of the U.S. this means you are going to need to be a truly casual player to have your needs met by this service.

It actually did more than you think. Not Steam Machines per se, but Valve's push for Linux gaming. Due to Valve's push, they helped development of radeonsi, radv, amdgpu, llvm backend for amdgpu, Wine, dxvk, vkd3d and so on. All that improved Linux gaming tremendously if you paid attention. It helps when a heavyweight backs the technology.

Everybody is trying to get in on this. Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, etc. Granted it works and people will decry it over physical hardware until hardware gets phased out like with Blu-Ray players, but we'll see.

This is going to come down to pricing and content, as long as the service works as advertised. It sounds like it could be expensive to maintain the infrastructure since they're targeting high end gaming.

They're also going to face some serious competition from Microsoft, especially if the entire Xbox library is available on xCloud at launch. Google will have to convince developers to port their games to Stadia while Microsoft has the advantage of Xbox games just working without any code changes. Not to mention Xbox and PC game development coming closer together.

Some people might not like the idea of game streaming, I'm not entirely convinced myself, but I do welcome the competition in the gaming space.

It's not competition when there are zero Stadia subscriptions sold. I'm not going to hold my breath in 2020 waiting on the Google earnings report to tell us how many Stadia subs they have going.

BTW, just having a sort-of developer story isn't good enough. Ask Microsoft how UWP has gone.

Of course it's competition, we'll just have to wait to see if Google is successful or not. The mere announcement of Google entering the market will elicit a response from the players already in the market.

I guess for that it matters how much money I have to drop in to get started. If all I need is a small monthly fee (which it sounds like), it doesn't really matter if it doesn't exist in a few years. I can still use it now and just move to whatever takes it's place in the future. Anything that requires a lot of time and effort to get involved and to switch from later I won't touch from Google. This seems like there isn't really a lot of room for lock in from Google, so their inability to stick with anything isn't as big of a deal.

THIS. If people don't like the model, stop using them. People whine so goddam much about FREE services disappearing. These people need to get some sort of business perspective in their brains: Google will continue to provide services if they make Google money, no matter what model: free-to-users and sell ads; make users pay and don't sell ads; make users pay AND selll adds..whatever. It's as simple as that.

I was on the AC Odyssey beta of this and it ran pretty good. The graphics were good, though at times you could tell it was being compressed, and it would have been nice to pick a different resolution (it streams at 1080 but my monitor is 1440). Wasn't really any input lag that I could tell.

Why do people call 2560×1440 "2K"? 2K is 2048×1080. Call it QHD if you don't want to write 1440p.

Who brought up 2560x1440? That's almost as esoteric a resolution as 2560x1600. Really though, I expect lossy 4k to look noticeably worse than a clean 1920x1080 image as far as compression blurriness goes. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Edit: oh the GP was mentioning how the 1920x1080 image was interpolated to a 2560x1440 screen. Yeah, that's going to look horrible even without any video streaming.

It actually did more than you think. Due to Valve's push for Linux, they helped developint of radeonsi, radv, amdgpu, llvm backend for amdgpu, Wine, dxvk, vkd3d and so on. All that improved Linux gaming tremendously if you paid attention. It helps when a heavyweight backs the technology.

Meanwhile the marke share of Linux among Steam users dropped from 2.5% to 0.7% and dropping.

Studios that were experimenting with native Linux support gave up (for example Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light were Linux native, Metro Exodus is not and there no plans for a port).

Heck, there's weirdness like id Software games work on Linux with little to no effort, but Bethesda won't let them release Linux versions.

Yeah, what I really want to do is play video games with an extra 20 to 150 ms (I am guessing) of input lag.

4K 60Hz video games streaming....hahahahaha RIP data caps.

Sorry, I'll stick to downloading and install my games. At least then I can play them in 2560x1400 at whatever fidelity and frame rate my 1080Ti will manage.

I think people may be overstating the bandwidth and latency challenges while underestimating the advancements in technology.

While I'll have to see it myself to believe it, Microsoft has said they've gotten latency under 10 ms and find more latency from the Bluetooth stack. They're also aiming for bandwidth usage under 10 mbps, which is less than some Netflix streams.

Google believes that open source is good for everyone. It enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems. This is especially true on Stadia, as we believe the game development community has a strong history of collaboration, innovation and shared gains as techniques and technology continually improve. We’re investing in open-source technology to create the best platform for developers, in partnership with the people that use it. This starts with our platform foundations of Linux and Vulkan and shows in our selection of GPUs that have open-source drivers and tools. We’re integrating LLVM and DirectX Shader Compiler to ensure you get great features and performance from our compilers and debuggers. State-of-the-art graphics tools are critical to game developers, and we’re excited to leverage and contribute to RenderDoc, GAPID and Radeon GPU Profiler — best of breed open-source graphics debugging and profiling tools that are continually improving.

I'm optimistic. I keep imagining Battle Royal games with thousands of players on a single field of battle; or a truly massive MMO with tens of thousands of players in a single instance world (no EU/US server separation).

The scaling opportunities for this are staggering.

I'm not sure a BR with that many players would actually be fun. Part of the appeal to BR is the feeling that while your odds of winning are low, they're not tiny.

A BR match with thousands of players would lack that feature and I rather suspect it would be a non-starter as a result.

As for MMOs with tens of thousands of players on a single instance...you do realise that MMOs are basically already server-side games right? The clients are basically just rendering server-side state and accepting input. If they could manage tens of thousands of players in a single instance they would be doing it already...

BR: teams. It doesn't need to be 1-player wins. Think Helms Deep. We could have war-games that involve any number of factions with more players in each than we've had in any single-instance MMO or BR to date.

MMO: You're thinking existing games with existing limitations. I'm not thinking another WoW. I'm thinking an actual living, thriving, world on a scale we've yet to see.

it's all scale, and from the sounds of it - this can scale beyond anything we've considered to this point.

We already have BR team games. They work pretty well with 3 or 4 players teams at current player densities. A BR game with thousands of players would require massive teams which in turn dilute the sense of individual contribution.

When was the last time you played a match of Conquest in Battlefield and felt like you were the lever that moved the world (and won the match).

Like I said before, your ideas don't mesh with the appeal of BR.

As for MMOs....eh...I'm not sure a living, thriving world is what people actually want? If a game starts feeling like real life or a job it's not really that fun except for a very small subset of players.

You're welcome to keep dreaming but personally I prefer to adopt a less pie-in-the-sky attitude to new stuff like this because every few years there's a new pie in a new sky and it usually ends up being a disappointment to those that bought into the hype...

Meanwhile the marke share of Linux among Steam users dropped from 2.5% to 0.7% and dropping.

I'm not so interested in the market share as in the size of the Linux gaming market. Total amount of Linux gamers has increased. Amount of games has increased as well, and more developers are releasing for Linux than a just a few years ago. I.e. Linux market is growing. I don't expect rapid growth, but the trend is positive. With Google joining the scene, it can accelerate.

The amount of people on here saying "I don't need this, I'll play games on my console / expensive rig" really feels like they don't understand the market Google is going after, or how much it potentially opens gaming to people that can't afford consoles / expensive rigs. Now, what the overlap is between people with great internet with high bandwidth and low latency, and those without the money for consoles / PCs, remains to be seen.

The benefit of Google's controller is that it eliminates a little bit of the lag, in that it talks to the server directly, rather than going through whatever you're using to render the frames being sent back as an intermediary. So although normally you would have the lag from the controller to the console / PC (if wireless), the controller connects to your router and talks to Google's servers. Not sure how much lag wireless controllers introduce, and whether investing in a new controller is worth eliminating that lag, however.

I was in on the beta for this. I put about 60 hours into Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (game was great). The Google gaming services was pretty fantastic the whole time. Never noticed controller lag (unless there was something wrong with my network). 60fps at 1080p on my computer through Chrome at max graphics settings the whole time. Short load times. The experience was great. Left feedback that I would absolutely sign up for this product at a reasonable price.

HOWEVER; it killed my Comcast data cap. I average about 250GB of my 1TB/month cap. After 60 hours of streaming AC:O at 1080p 60fps, I hit about 1.2TB that month. Got a mean email from Comcast. Looked around for another ISP without data caps and cried.

Though I understand the large amount of concern surrounding how long Google will actually support this, I personally feel like the amount of concern regarding the technology itself is overblown here.

Latency and Input lag: Google has a massive advantage here, far and above over any of the other current streaming providers. With the sheer number of edge nodes they have, the vast majority of prospective users are within a 15ms round trip time to the nearest node (Myself, I am a 6ms round-trip on my home connection, and 15ms on my work, government connection). With the controller itself being network-attached (and connected directly to your game instance), it reduces the amount of latency introduced locally significantly. It would not be unreasonable to see a 10-20ms input delay, right in line with current consoles.

Internet/Bandwidth: Speaking as a Canadian, I can totally understand the concern regarding bandwidth usage. I consider myself one of the lucky ones to have gigabit-level service. Hopefully this will drive ISPs to expand their networks. That said, those with a strong connection should be able to accept those highest of resolutions, with compression similar to that of most digital video formats - completely reasonable IMO (Or with less compression at lower resolution if that's your jam)

I think the biggest thing we are overlooking is the opportunities for games and developers - Watching the presentation, I was blown away at the possibility of AAA split screen games again, or more novel options with multiple viewpoints without sacrificing fidelity. What about a SWAT-type game with one player acting as a mission lead, monitoring all camera feeds at once and issuing commands. Or as they mentioned, games with vastly increased player counts. Games where Cheating is near-impossible - All compute is done server-side, so there is no game data to manipulate.

I think if anyone can pull it off, they can. I think with the right monitization scheme, this could be a big part of Google for a long time to come - Since it presses more users into one of its existing big money-makers (Youtube), I doubt they will have any difficulty making it worthwhile economically.

On the Development side, VS. PC or Mobile, you have the massive advantage of developing for a single set of hardware, and having it ubiquitously available to all users, regardless what platform they chose at home.

I think this is a much bigger game-changer than many of us have expressed, and look forward to how exactly this pans out.

The amount of people on here saying "I don't need this, I'll play games on my console / expensive rig" really feels like they don't understand the market Google is going after, or how much it potentially opens gaming to people that can't afford consoles / expensive rigs. Now, what the overlap is between people with great internet with high bandwidth and low latency, and those without the money for consoles / PCs, remains to be seen.

The benefit of Google's controller is that it eliminates a little bit of the lag, in that it talks to the server directly, rather than going through whatever you're using to render the frames being sent back as an intermediary. So although normally you would have the lag from the controller to the console / PC (if wireless), the controller connects to your router and talks to Google's servers. Not sure how much lag wireless controllers introduce, and whether investing in a new controller is worth eliminating that lag, however.

The amount of people on here saying "I don't need this, I'll play games on my console / expensive rig" really feels like they don't understand the market Google is going after, or how much it potentially opens gaming to people that can't afford consoles / expensive rigs. Now, what the overlap is between people with great internet with high bandwidth and low latency, and those without the money for consoles / PCs, remains to be seen.

The benefit of Google's controller is that it eliminates a little bit of the lag, in that it talks to the server directly, rather than going through whatever you're using to render the frames being sent back as an intermediary. So although normally you would have the lag from the controller to the console / PC (if wireless), the controller connects to your router and talks to Google's servers. Not sure how much lag wireless controllers introduce, and whether investing in a new controller is worth eliminating that lag, however.

Yeah, I'm thinking my complaints about image sharpness don't even apply when you factor in how TVs look compared to computer monitors. This system has the potential to make PC gaming easy for the masses and this could be literally game-changing.